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To these leading changes, affecting the principles of the constitution, other restrictions were added of a subordinate and more external character, some of which nevertheless produced a deep effect The privilege of the king to have his fields tilled by task-work of the burgesses, and the special relation of clientship in which the metoeci as a body must have stood to the king, ceased of themselves with the life tenure of the office.
To these leading changes, affecting the principles of the constitution, other restrictions were added of a subordinate and more external character, some of which nevertheless produced a deep effect The privilege of the king to have his fields tilled by task-work of the burgesses, and the special relation of clientship in which the metoeci as a body must have stood to the king, ceased of themselves with the life tenure of the office.
Each of these four levy-districts had to furnish approximately the fourth part not only of the force as a whole, but of each of its military subdivisions, so that each legion and each century numbered an equal proportion of conscripts from each region, in order to merge all distinctions of a gentile and local nature in the one common levy of the community and, especially through the powerful levelling influence of the military spirit, to blend the metoeci and the burgesses into one people.
Nevertheless the number of the metoeci was of necessity constantly on the increase and liable to no diminution, while that of the burgesses was at the utmost perhaps not decreasing; and in consequence the metoeci necessarily acquired by imperceptible degrees another and a freer position.
While however the republican revolution may, notwithstanding the aristocratic rule which in the first instance it established, be justly called a victory of the former metoeci or the -plebs-, the revolution even in this respect bore by no means the character which we are accustomed in the present day to designate as democratic.
But when the community itself was called regularly to elect and to decide, and the president was practically reduced from its master to its commissioner for a set term, this relation could no longer be maintained as it stood; least of all when the state had to be remodelled on the morrow of a revolution, which could only have been carried out by the co-operation of the patricians and the metoeci . An extension of that community was inevitable; and it was accomplished in the most comprehensive manner, inasmuch as the collective plebeiate, that is, all the non-burgesses who were neither slaves nor citizens of extraneous communities living at Rome under the -ius hospitii-, were admitted into the burgess-body.
Although, moreover, the institution of the centuries was not intended to curtail the political privileges exclusively possessed by the burgesses as hitherto represented in the curies, yet it was inevitable that those rights, which the burgesses hitherto had exercised not as the assembly of curies, but as the burgess-levy, should pass over to the new centuries of burgesses and metoeci . Henceforward, accordingly, it was the centuries whose consent the king had to ask before beginning an aggressive war.
Hitherto, particularly when new domains were acquired by conquest, allocations of land had been regularly arranged, in which all the poorer burgesses and metoeci were provided for; it was only the land which was not suitable for agriculture that was annexed to the common pasture.
This was thenceforth laid not upon the burgesses as such, but upon the possessors of land, the -tribules-, whether they might be burgesses or mere metoeci ; service in the army was changed from a personal burden into a burden on property. The details of the arrangement were as follow. The Five Classes
While however the republican revolution may, notwithstanding the aristocratic rule which in the first instance it established, be justly called a victory of the former metoeci or the -plebs-, the revolution even in this respect bore by no means the character which we are accustomed in the present day to designate as democratic.
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